Cascade! Fall 2011
Course Catalog

• There are approximately 750,000 men, women, and children homeless nationwide.
• It has been predicted that global climate changes’ effects on agriculture will kill 184 million people in Africa alone by the end of this century.
• Human activity has led to an animal extinction rate that is estimated to be at least one-hundred times higher than the expected natural rate.
• Approximately three to four million cats and dogs are euthanized at animal shelters across the country annually.
• In just one hundred days, an estimated two million people were killed in the Rwandan genocide.

The enormity of these numbers makes these statistics daunting. Sometimes it feels like the issues are too large to tackle. But that shouldn’t stop you from becoming an informed individual and doing something to make a difference. This class will discuss issues like homelessness, global warming, endangered species, animal cruelty, and genocide. We will not only examine the source of these problems, but what action is currently being taken and what you can do about it. So get ready to change the world.

One thing that people don’t know very much about in today’s society is the biological mechanisms of exercise. What happening when your muscles get bigger? How are they getting stronger? Is this muscle milk going to make me bigger? And finally, great scott, how did he manage to dunk from the free-throw line? This class will start out with some of the basics of exercise physiology, including the respiratory and circulatory system, then some basic nutritional science linked with how our bodies store and used the energy from different foods. The class will culminate with a class on the effects of different performing enhancing drugs.


Prerequisites
An intro course in biology is preferred but not required.

In this class we will focus on the art of description. With description, we can draw our audience into a new world—a world that we have the complete power to create. Once there, our stories cease to be a series of letters on a page and start to become a reality to our readers. Whether describing a blossoming tree or the lines on an old woman’s face, we can use details to make our writing real. Honing our descriptive skills will turn our stories into art!

Hybrids are common figures in myths and stories around the world - creatures whose bodies are strange combinations of contradictory forms of existence. They are gods, monsters, teachers, victims, madmen, and heroes - their bodies illustrate a psychological strugge of good vs. evil, man vs. beast, mortal vs. god, and male vs. female. Hybrids are a collage of whatever concepts are important enough to worship or warn against, so by studying them we'll learn about the specific moral values, gender roles, afterlife beliefs, and social structures of the culture that imaged them. How do cultures differ on what lifestyles and behaviors should be praised and condemned? Are there certain ideas about god, good and evil, or gender that are common in cultures from different places and times? Hybrids and their strange bodies can give us clues.

Do you ever think about how business deals are made in the real world? What kinds of things do business owners, companies, entrepreneurs & investors consider when making important decisions? Or what knowledge and skill sets are needed to understand how the stock market, real estate values or owning your own business really works? You can start by learning the fundamental ideas of economics. It’s basics are the backbone for understanding HOW all of these processes work. As a matter a fact, economics is a really important part of our daily lives, even though we may not realize it. We make decisions everyday about where to live, what kind of clothes to buy, what to eat. All of these decisions are our economic choices. When you think about it, economics is a part of almost everything you could ever think in today’s society. In this class, we will learn the basics principals of economics, discuss how consumers make economic decisions, what factors impact these decisions, & ultimately gain a much deeper understanding of the role of economics in our daily lives.

Are our entire lives just part of one long dream of a person we have never met? Do any physical objects exist outside of our minds? Will the Sun rise tomorrow? Does 2+2=5? We seem to know the answers to these questions, yet when we examine the justifications for these beliefs, we often find them lacking. This question, whether we can ever know anything, has been called the fundamental problem of philosophy. In this course, we will examine what knowledge is and how we can come to know something by looking at classical skeptical arguments from ancient Greece up until today, trying to better understand this important way we interact with the world. While it won't always be easy, and there is no book with answers in the back (or even answers, sometimes), properly investigating how we can know things changes the way we view our world and the life we live in it.


Prerequisites
A willingness to think really hard to answer questions you never thought to ask.

People talk all the time, but most people do not think about the sounds and processes that contribute to making speech sounds. Phonology is the study of those sounds and processes. This class will use computers to break down speech sounds and to examine how speech can be represented visually. Students will then use this information to investigate some common speech phenomenon and to learn about some of the ways that speech can vary from person to person. This class will teach students how to critically examine the speech that we use in our daily life.

Plan a story. Write a screenplay. Get out the camera and film for a day. Movies and television are one of the biggest industries in the United States – but feature length films are only part of the picture. Music videos, commercials, and episodes of TV shows are all part of yet another subset of media: the short film, or short. We hope you’ve got a creative side, because this course is all about the art of producing a short.

Over the course of five weeks, we will make a screenplay, act it out for the camera, and edit the pieces into a short film less than five minutes long. We’ll also get to see a slew of short films and analyze just what makes them effective. The Academy says a short is 40 minutes or less – can you do it in five?

In this class we will seek to uncover the features, boundaries, and purposes of the self. Through philosophical thought experiments, analysis of basic psychological principles, and meaningful class discussion, we will decipher how our own ideas about identity are altered (for better or worse) by the world around us. The ultimate goal of this course is for each of us to come to a more firm understanding of who we are as individuals, and what we mean when we say “I”. By clearly defining what the self is, we can begin to discover the things in life that give us true satisfaction, as well as how to better sort through the life-long questions of “Who am I?” “What am I meant to do?” and “What should I do about it?”

We are living in one of the most diverse, and one of the most mediated, countries in the world. Whether its the butt of a joke or the stereotype in a role, race is a constant factor in the media that we obsorb everyday and yet we often shy away from truly open conversations concerning race. In this class we'll take a chance to express what we see and what it can mean, to look at the comedy, reality, action and reaction that occurs in American media and analyze the dialectic of racial representation that it constructs.